Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Ghosts abound if you know how to look for them. After reading my TRUE report on the Maco Ghost a friend sent me the following note from his home town of Abingdon, Virginia -- Dalton Hammond

Well, Ghostbuster, our pulpit-pounding preachers have chased the devil out of the mountains, so maybe he found refuge in east Carolina....but if you want to chase ghosts come on up to our little town. We're overrun with ghosts and spooks and things that go bump in the night.

We've got so many there's a professional ghost expert who conducts regular tours of haunted sites at $15 bucks a head. The tourists love it and she's making a good living.

But forget the $15...I'll give you a tour for free:

I'll show you the place on the floor at the Martha Washington Inn where the blood of a dead Confederate soldier seeps through the wood on occasion. The Inn (then a girl's school) was a hospital during "da wah" and the soldier supposedly died there and still haunts the place. Several of the guest rooms are haunted as well and I've heard the hotel charges extra to stay in them.

The ghost of Robert Porterfield, founder of the Barter Theatre, is reputed to haunt the old theatre and several actors have reported seeing him appear at the back of the hall during performances, dressed in his customary white dinner jacket. One such apparition a few years ago brought the play to a halt when the actors froze on stage and couldn't remember their lines. The old theater, which dates to the early 1800s, has several other ghosts as well. I know personally of a wardrobe lady who refuses to work in a dark little room downstairs.

Then there's The Tavern, built in 1779 , where the spirit of a girl murdered in the building more than a century ago occasionally shows up and gooses the waitreses, causing them to drop their trays. And then there's the closed-off attic - used as a hospital during the Civil War - where numbers marking where beds were placed appear and disappear on the wall in blood red. [My] uncle...is friends with an electrician who fled in terror when the numbers started glowing while he was working on the power line.

We even have a horse ghost. As the story goes, the horse belonged to one of the Yankees who burned the town during the War for Southern Independence and was shot and killed by the local militia. The horse ran away but is still seen on occasion, galloping riderless down Church Street.

There's lots of others as well....including the apparition that appears at a window on the second floor of the Washington County News, which has been located in the same building for 200 years, and the spirit that floats above a grave in the old Sinking Springs Cemetery. The spirit is said to be that of a Confederate deserter who was forced to dig his own grave and stand beside it while he was put to death by firing squad.